America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There's a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we've created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
True, my southern Illinois relatives are aware they can catch an Amtrak to the cities, but the trains suck really bad and the stations are often in a terrible place to leave anything of value (like your car) so they just drive when the occasionally need to go to the city for something like real healthcare
And the Amtrak in southern Illinois can be hours late.
What cities? One of the high speed rail proposals is that it makes a lot of sense to build a Midwest passenger rail network with Chicago as the center. There’s already a huge freight rail network and huge underutilized right of way. Think of how many decent sized cities are within a couple hundred miles of Chicago, and all the business and personal reasons to travel among them. We just need to stop sending all our transportation money to yet more roads we can’t afford to maintain
The Amtrak station in St. Louis is not a great spot to leave anything of value. I live in St. Louis so I’m not one of these crazies that thinks my city is a war zone but that lot gets plenty of attention from thieves breaking windows looking for guns and money.
And SoIL folks don’t go to Chicago, remember there is a substantial number of Illinoisans calling for everything south of Springfield to be split into the 51st state. No it wouldn’t be sustainable or make sense but they hate being “controlled” by cook county